1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of establishing a mesh network, and more particularly, to a method of establishing a smart architecture cell mesh network for Machine-to-Machine communication.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Machine-type communication (MTC), also referred to as “Machine-to-Machine” or “M2M”, is one type of data communication including one or more entities not requiring human interactions. That is, the MTC refers to the concept of communication based on a network such as the existing GERAN, UMTS, long-term evolution (LTE), or the like used by a machine device instead of a mobile station (MS) used by a user. The machine device used in the MTC can be called an MTC device. There are various MTC devices such as a vending machine, a machine of measuring a water level at a dam, etc. That is, the MTC is widely applicable in various fields. The MTC device has features different from that of a typical MS. Therefore, a service optimized to the MTC may differ from a service optimized to human-to-human communication. In comparison with a current mobile network communication service, the MTC can be characterized as a different market scenario, data communication, less costs and efforts, a potentially great number of MSs for communication, wide service areas, low traffic per MS, etc.
Smart metering has been on the deployment road map for the last two decades, waiting for technology and innovation to drive down implementation costs to an extent whereby payback was achieved. Realistically that fulcrum of innovation over cost is still not achieved to date.
Some pure play Mesh networks (Mesh v1.0) have been proposed and deployed in the Smart Metering market, such as the SecureMesh network from Trilliant, and the Utility IQ Silver Spring Network. Both Mesh networks, propose to have many simple mesh nodes that do not have WAN connectivity capability. All Mesh nodes are to be communicated back to the software head end through an established PSTN (normally a cable/fiber infrastructure) “gateway” concentrator node. It collects all the communication from all the nodes, and then transports them back to the server.
This, in theory, presents a low cost solution to deploy Smart Metering by having each expensive Gateway Concentrator to support 1000 to 2000 lower cost Mesh nodes. However, it proves to be wrong in many real life environments. The typical mesh nodes per gateway may be in the range of 20 to 50 nodes in a practical deployment. Therefore, the economical proposal of the solution has been invalidated. On top of that, a deployment of several hundred thousand gateway concentrators requires careful site survey and significant deployment planning. This will add a huge hidden extra cost into a large-scale deployment of this kind of Mesh network. The single largest concern when deploying large-scale infrastructure across distributed geographies/customer is that of “ease of implementation”. The costs of missed visits, coupled with incorrect siting of concentrators, all increases the risk as well as the solution costs.
Another significant drawback to this network type, is the associated liability of a large-scale mesh concentrator “brown out” and its knock on effect to the sub-servant mesh nodes. Typically to overcome this potential failing one would engineer additional capacity for concentrator backhaul—thus increasing the overall deployment costs further.